November 11, 1990
C H A P T E R T H R E E
CHARACTER, ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE WAY OF HEAVEN.
"Books speak to the mind, friends speak to the heart, Heaven speaks to the soul, everything else speaks only to the ears". Chinese Proverb.
"Why does a god no more inscribe the brow of a mortal, Setting his seal, as of old, on victim chosen above? Or he would come himself, assuming the shape of a mortal, Thus with solace and peace to crown the celestial feast"....... Alderin.
Hear your thoughts, but do not chase them away with meaningless difficulties. Zenist maxim. ---
CHARACTER, ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE WAY OF HEAVEN.
When feelings express the truth they are not refined by words but confused by them. Such experiences occur at times when the deepest part of our inner nature presides in our ordinary life. The feeling that is called forth in such a moment possesses the mark of confused astonishment, for it is Truth which calls upon us. If we go further and study something of the history of our opinions, we are then making a vital step towards an emancipated mind and an unfolding of a spiritual nature. This has to be a vocal search, where mind and heart reach out to arriving of Being, for it is there that we will find the songs of humanitarian existence and in so doing, approach the steps leading to the Way of Heaven.
In the expanse of our lives, the search for a permanent solution to inner security cannot easily be found. No structured set of beliefs, ideology, qualification or membership card, style or technique of power can answer this difficulty of existence. Inner peace is rare. Few of us could claim to have resolved the deeper issues of our own personal losses, but we search and find in our unease, still, that the quest to find meaningful beliefs is essential to stave off a hollow life. It is a life of upsets and confusions both purposeful and purposeless. A life that has need of the strength of our truest feelings. Modernity has given many joyless roles in a professionally frenetic malaise. The intelligence of the people is well felt to be polarizing under the stress of insecurity brought about by old conflicts unresolved and restored to a modern age. We, not surprisingly, lack the clarity of the Ancients, even though we hold fast to our hearts the universal call of the Way of Heaven, where we approach a personally higher state of Being and so become beings of Being. So universal is this inner call to deepen our own individual security, to develop an Enlightened Character, to satisfy the needs of Wisdom over mere knowledge, that we feel pressured to remember that it is on these values that our human rights depend. How badly the gentle and misguided suffer from this greenstick fracture of human character! The history that we have witnessed is both grandiose in hope and frequently futile in performance. Many need amnesty from the unjust Ways of Man, too few receive it. From the high to the lowly, felt within the family to the nation, ill defined power roots out the worst of our disease and places it within the heart of our relations.
Modernity's culture gives us a life that it is overflowing with acquaintanceships and finds but small slots for dear friends. To approach the Way of Heaven is foremost to act through "humanheartedness". The humanheartedness of the Buddhists advises us to develop both understanding and compassion towards all sentient beings. It is this sense of goodwill which we may find is truly lacking in the heart of our actions. As a result both the people and other sentient beings find they are compelled to suffer, as the world struggles through too often makeshift beliefs. In this denial of humanheartedness we are arguing that Time is space. That our lifestyles can acommodate rarely a sense of human being. In this world too readily peoples hearts hide behind a facade of dualistic expedience cloaked in well beaten attitudes. Beaten but not stirred! Laughter is the great healer which none of us would revoke for worldly things. Buddha is laughing as the cure for our absurdity, pomposity and seriousness. Laugh and find a new meaning. Laugh NOW !!!! Is it not sweet to taste the flavour of changing experience and let go of constraining beliefs?
It would appear that the nature of the western mind tackles the issues of peace, while demanding the freedom to offer a military power to well paying regimes. This produces a world where the disturbingly tarred commercial helping hand produces a new level of conflict, a new staging of struggle. We may excuse or defend the world of man's affairs with phrases like, autonomy of state-hood, or freedom for individual/group, but these ideas being partisan may still lack a deeper feeling of liberating goodwill and compassion as right to all sentient beings. It is easy to be overcomed by harsh attitudes and to cast webs of duplicity in our dealings how dispossessed of surprise we are by the unjust actions of those in distant lands and the closer shores of personal expedience.
Whether of East or West, young or old, strongly partisan hands have come to accept that if the glove of power fits well to an expedient course, then why not where wear it. The Buddhist mind would find themselves concerned for this failing of integrity towards the world, for Life's concern has more than finely honed words. One must develop a home for a true feeling of principle. However, this is as many argue a "REAL" world, one where the actions of those with upper hands are hidden by political distance and the ability to threaten powerful reprisals. This deepening insecurity results in the self estrangement where doubt and suspici¬on is bred. Trust is a European theatre where nuclear solutions are evident to the well read, while terrorism is almost a national imperative in the minds of the socially and politically oppressed. Again we may choose to venture that the Taoist maxim
As Above so Below is applicable here. True character operates without the need to be power alone intelligence and virtue are vital. "When there is injustice, then there is reaction". Taoist Wisdom asserts that when there is attachment to things, one cannot remain quiescent and detached. Arms are implements of ill omen that should be abhorred by men. Therefore, the Way of Heaven asks that the Women/Man of Tao does not abide them. These are difficult ideals in a world structured through struggling power bases and clever forms of weaponery. We are engulfed by this attachment to survive as survivalists. Surely a saddening level of preoccuopation of human resources. But again ~As Above so Below.
Laugh at this and encourage others to throw out thoughts which deplete the human spirit. Please consider how Modernity has given us new ideas, new attachments where the politics of our enlightenment is steeped at all levels of materialist attachment. It is attachment which serves us in our materialistic quest. Attachment which writes an ascribed meaning to our lives. Attachment which is an appointment with ourselves and our political manipulations to protect our beliefs. How can we meet ourselves in a honest light, a light that can encompass others? One takes by giving to others through a sound philosophy of experience. This is our stuggle find our state of existence beyond our beliefs or machinations of morality. Modernity is changed through our personal struggle with the shape of our inner politics by the philosophy of our experience. Enlightenment is historic, is a political event. Enlightenment is a struggle in which the trivial issues lead to great ones. Personal politics is the stuff of everyday power. It is to easy to feel that interpersonal politics is best relegated to politics with a small "p". This politics is a political endeavour of worth where the power to approach our own being of being can be marred by the difficult relations between the self, the world and others. Imagine a world without communication systems, without transport, light or power tools. We would soon have to develop new forms of power relations or fall into barbaric times. We would polarize against the new the other or be benevolently innocent as children can be. If we underestimate the significance of power, avoid its meaning, this is not wise for it shapes our potential in many ways. Its importance is how it contains us.We are like a vessel: its use is in its emptiness. If we do not estimate the potential value of our higher being through the political nature of our enlightenment, of being of Being, then we are victims of our own aversion to uncovering the essentiality of experience.
Life is political in this sense appreciation of essential feeling. To meet ones attachment to power bases is to understand the nature of our relations and step towards enlightenment. The acceptance of political forms and states is a necessary step in the realizing of Buddha nature. Political awareness is strong mark of humanity in transition. When considered the partisan messages of national and local political interest are by nature ambiguous, yet the obvious remains. Some want what they must take from others. Often they wish to take everything. This is good for some and so it is bad for us all. Much depends on the relative values you place on the components of the interplay. At the end of all this value-izing there is Power, how will it be used and why? Today, the Way of Man desires this Power as much as it fights towards peace, and those with upper hands create obscene homages of ritual to these ends. Billions are spent on the launches and parades of showy international projects, yet proudly we do not tend to the damage done in our own political back gardens, but with hands weary, eyes tired and throats sore, we rush forwards. Industrialism has generated a new humankind. One that has accumulated the experience of basic dread in simply existing. Then Modernity's face has not engaged us in the philosophy of our own experience to meet internal mastery. The struggled to meet ourselves is not on our agenda for it is difficult. It may change too much. Our worldly masters regail against any expression which upsets the politics of the day. In such moments the ego adopts a policy of expedient denial followed by grand gestures. They are our shadow selves. Darkly they say we will panic in the face of truth and tell us what the truth should be! How is it that they seek our dependency in such a way. Are we less than the evolution of our highest values and strongest insights? The world is but will and idea where history reflects what we perceive, need or wish to see, within ourselves. Is this so frightening, so disturbing. A child is reborn to maturity through cancer often discharges the Wisest of being through innocence and simple recognition of what is.
Enlightenment is acceptance of the gift of innocence. An innocence where truth resides and beauty is alive. Modernity has changed the eyes of the individual, we now function as if life itself is accepting of the role of product. Many are scrapped. We are schooled and comforted through the terminal ways, we are industrious international Man. This is world culture -Modernity on high heels, licking its lips over the eroticism of power, where we both witness and are subjects of heritage. The blind need not fear snakes but may still be bitten and deeply so. The Way of Heaven and many others, leads us to suppose that our thoughts can arrive through the influences of enlightened planes; a Jungian collective unconsciousness of the soul, if you will. The soul historically is viewed as the Abode of our Ancestors. If we accept this as a serving possibility, then Modernity need not command its prime role of soullessness action floundering in a troubled sea of dualism bearing materialistic fruits. We know that it is a world of injustice and hope which produces tense aggression in the heart and a disturbed will. The individual seeks an escape from the sense of uneasiness and self estrangement most probably long averted by routine and conflict, pursuit and ideal. However, to have a feeling for the historical unconsciousness of the soul is not religious zeal gone awry, there is value in the suchness of a human image that is possessive of a soul. Consider how such a simple idea affronts the smallest and mightest of powers! ...What a strange thing. The tear and a smile. The ancient view of Heaven's Way recommends that our mind be aware of the causation of power flowing within our thoughts. Thoughts which are creating the self. Thoughts which enable us to know how the self has become divorced from its humanistic nature. Such thoughts enable our sense of certainty and doubt a condition long recognized and appreciated by the mindful nature of Chan & Zen Buddhism and romantic naturalism of Taoism. True Romanticism is the root of human expression. It will in time debunk much of Modernities post war behaviourism and its functional goals. The romantic pen and the romantic heart throws a penetrating light into our lives. It is humanism and beyond that is of major concern for the self, for we cannot understand the development of an "experience" if the self is removed from its own nature. The self seeks a clearly animated centre of mindfulness and feeling. The self, is beneath the dramatic mask of the personality; the public styled face that has become conditioned to meet the world of circumstance, expectancy and memory through the objectification of thought. The mask acts through popular and fashioned desires. Desires that give a feeling for the transitional nature of the world, like the dream that unfolds without a story. Our passions enraptures us when such central images stay in the mind. We may capture the feelings of these events through our clothes, jewellery, interests, the cigarette and coffee/tea, or the ubiquitous toddy of alcohol. These are the totems of heritage, commonplace rituals which help us through the challenges of a day and even more so with the routine offer an expression and are our new magical rites, replacing the protecting charm or talisman. Romanticism is more than boy meets girl. It is life that greets the world. Modernity has abused and confused our new inner Gods. Romantic character enlightens us to change. To accept a new power into one's Being requires the Wisdom of worldly romance and a meeting with knowledge.
Knowledge is an event of Being. Knowledge can only take root through the quality and transitional nature of our beliefs. There is no "magic" to these beliefs. They are adopt or proscribed by perceived needs, dreams, hopes and insecurity to a world view often untried to any yardstick of Being. There use is in the accounting of an experience, fragments -beads around our necks. These beads are colourful badges of our desires promoting our identities to go for it! Humanity leaps and lurches through its passions. Witness our heritage. Witness our use of knowledge. Knowledge is today in many minds self serving image, an anticipated event, a salesman's triumph. The Taoists would feel this view as living a life without a genuine appreciation of reality. The highest attainment is free from attainment. Therefore there is attainment. The lowest attainment is free from attainment. Therefore there is no attainment....... Anticipated knowledge is the Superficiality of Tao and is the beginning of foolishness. Hence the great man choses reality and not superficiality. Superficiality was viewed by the writer Wang Pi 226- 249 A.D. as describing Life through anticipated knowledge. In this perspective the self produces a state of mind which does not embrace reality for the self feels through its grasping and insecurity that the world can be viewed clearly by intellect. Taoism sees this as vanity and therefore it conceives cleverness as being primordial in form. Lao Tzu used humour to highlight the short falls of self promoting cleverness to treat the symptoms of conceit, separation and denial. Cleverness is structured condition found in many places, it manipulates without itself being available to manipulation. This structured form of insecurity has been developed by the ethos that cites weighing up of knowledge and effort produces results. Modernity keeps an absurd array of tautological "track records" of bureaucratic "insight" which are usually forgone conclusions in strangely ridiculous ways. We can find comedy in this "realistic absurdity", where, the media hype asserts that "One small step for Man, a giant step for Mankind!" Would that we could walk in such a manner. In Modernity, the need to meet the real world head on, is soiled in feeling when the modern day ethos of materialism purports a policy for life that pensions off the soul of experience, deriding the invincible creativity of Life. Oddly, if there is a modern celebration, for many it is self congratulatory. Many of the favoured are detached from Life in their achievement because of a constricting level the pensioned security won over others and themselves. In this they perceive others as suffering "obvious" inadequacy, an unfortunate world of losers, deemed handicapped by relativity and social facts. This attitude is in part the emotional face of Modernity, where the pressure to maintain a high level of public and self esteem, is as crucial now and as fundamental, as the need to save face, in the time of the kowtow, when the role play of the a Samurai or high court classes operated as strict formalities.
Modernity is styled today through many forces. The world of "magazine styled" media intimates that we live on an ideology of opportunism already lost to the delusion of the hope of equality a nd lucky breaks. We are trained to ignore the essential in our drive towards the end product, towards success. Spiritual success, for those with breadth and courage of heart is the discovery that one's culture has been born with an afterbirth of disease and inherent stress. vocal is for some to grasp at life. Every generation must struggle to maturity and come of age, -in this we present a face to reality. It is a public face issued from a private world. Modernity is fraught with youthful faces careering towards aged folly that zealous Confucians would have loved to have attempted to resolve. The Buddhist views our world culture as chasing after a self engrossing plethora of majestically blinding desire. No one is exempt, artists, workers, scientists, professionals of all walks, and our children all find the power of flight, of tangibility, through their need for some public faced success. The anxiety that is today's youthful ambition is styled through the present growth of individual assertion. The "me" culture of the West continues to overcome the "we" culture by virtue of powerful commercially felt desires, time and time again. Glory and happiness are baked in the wholesome heroics of insecure stereotypes coping with a wealth of magazine cultured issues supposedly of epic proportions. Our children are most vulnerable to personal difficulty of our own dreams and the needs we carry to enable their fulfilment. Children are both conservative by nature and reaction in desire, if we are not wary of our own lives in relation to theirs, then they may find themselves badly adjusted to Modernities face. They are offered a media styled face which offers fantasy, ritual and ceremony is no resolution to a clear sense of Wisdom and principle. For many, today's ingredients of identity frequently find meaning in a soap opera of motivations. Modernities worst media demands that the created common denominator must be catered for ad nausea, or else they are bound to explain and address the face of a disinherting world in cosmological crisis.
Ecological concern is the manifestation of the broadening of our hearts, a strengthening of concern to go ,,,,,wider than that. We must seek to understand this modern parcelling up of our lives into convenient compartments, where we deferred the NOW for some later satisfaction and security in Life, Love and the Warfare of Needs. Love and joy find their depths through the Way of Heaven, but the Way of Man offers achievement as a God and unfortunately we are for the most part of wholly mortal persuasions. The Buddhists say the mind is the slayer of the real and in Modernities eye we are also victim of this process of mind for we have little sense of our continued disinheritance. The Ancient Chinese of third century BC saw Heaven as a plane of existence, another world, a world apart from mortal man. It is in this world that our ancestors live. In our heritage we become born in the being of being because of our ancestors. Though no one would suggest a return to ancestor worship, few of us would comfortably suggest that they have escaped the historicism that continues to dominates our lives. Historicism is that which gives one a position as a human being. We all have lives and characters common to the fables of the classics. We live often as a form of mythological story, where the bibles which exist as a need of culture, give some guidance to approach the Ways of Heaven. Such ways offer a means to embrace Being not simply a Mystical form of Being but a human one that encompassed virtue -Te which is said to be the root of Character. Virtue is a process that flows towards genuineness of feeling and so expression of noble forms. The Sage is an idealized figure neither male or female, but simply the embodiment of Wisdom - a Snow Lion inhabiting a lofty and pure domain. However, the Sage has more difficulties than a mortal. A Sage has need of immortality to live the death of life. Character formation was always a struggle against the troubles of ignorance, egoism, attachment, revulsion and the possessiveness of pride. Humanity matures as it comes to recognize the inescapable danger of falling foul to a set of cherished desires and beliefs. The ostrich is said to bury its head at the approach of inescapable danger. The Ways of Heaven, of highest being, say we should not. Heaven is the space of the Wise, of pure relatedness, where there is place for everything, for everything is a place. No thought can be arrested as all is the same. As Zen would say simple suchness. From our seasons the cycle of entire motion Over and above us, then there is the Angel's play....
Taoist mystics tell us that to live in ones opinions and ten thousand conceits is exiled within a cyclic and depreciating existential plane of inner darkness. Heaven's message is like the finger pointing at the moon, -focus not on the finger, but at what is beyond the limits of self importance. The Zen Master points. The Taoist Sage alludes. The Confucian bows. ..Wonder Wonder! How marvelous is the teaching of no words. It cannot be grasped by hearing with the ear, for the voice is heard with the eye. Tozan. Zen and the Ways, (T. Leggett).
Heaven encourages us to remember that we are overseen and influenced by our predecessors. Well received Wisdom helps us climb upon our teachers shoulders, so we may better see where we have been. The Ordinary mind was considered by Chan / Zen Buddhism to be spoiled in its "naturalness". The use of the Koan system in Zen was to encourage enlightenment through the struggle with self fettering beliefs. Beliefs that estrange the self from realization of the divine. Oriental philosophy has offered many devices of mind and body to deal with these beliefs. Taoism offers naturalness,Buddhism, the acceptance of the inherent voidness of existence. Both offer the call of truth by being neither unattached or detached to the world of things. Zen stresses that it is through our discarding of any accumulation of attachment that ensures readiness come, to feel the hand of Being, this is the centre. However, this is no final state, our own being of Being has to evolve through each cultural backdrop. There are many schools of thought within each Oriental Philosophy, (Pure Land, Legalists etc) but the emphasis towards Heaven's highest values are always the same. The early Chinese were steeped in a monist perspective where the roleplay of each individual could only be asserted through the relations set via an Imperial chain of communication from Ancestors to Emperor to people. Heavens Way then helped the state of ordinary people through the preparations of Sage-Rulers attached to the court. They viewed the soul as the means by which the spirit of their ancestors could if they chose, have a "life" within the body of a mortal. Not an ordinary mortal, but the prepared body of a Sage-Ruler. An individual that had transcended mastery of the self. A variety of rituals were performed in accordance with the practices of the Shamans to prepare the human body to a sufficiently attractive state. It was then, all signs being favourable that the settling of a spirit or a God, was felt. Thus, one then had a soul, a life within. In this way the Rulers ensured that good would come to the common 8 people. To prepare the mind for "The Abode of the Ancestors" there were a whole host of familiar Oriental practices. Chuang Tzu advises us to, "Wander to where the ten thousand things both begin and end, unify your nature, ,,,,, (Te) foster your life breath, concentrate your "power" (the karmic nature of your intent the stock of actions which one is going to meet with good luck or bad this is Te, virtuous power),,,,,, -to produce purity of action, until it is one with all things after their kind -do this, and your "heaven" shall maintain its integrity". The Chinese cosmology of this age described "feelings", as "communications" from Heaven. Birds were Heaven's emissaries and the weather was Heavens mood. Such perspectives provided the necessary spiritual imagery to change the condition of heart and mind. The Way of Heaven to our present day lives represents the knowing of an inner world. Not one simply of morals, which may be seen as then as now as merely custom; of more for this, or more for that, but of the deeper insight which transcends the self and its position to seek a greater fortress of need and so a path towards unobstructed freedom. Heaven offers the way to attain Wisdom which can lead to the experience of Enlightenment. Through this search it is said that knowledge which comes Wisdom, will contain the breath of "attainment" and "maturity". The Ancients envisaged the arrival of genuineness character as an approach to enlightenment. Thus the values received from the ancestors were revered for there insight into the nature of spiritual "causes", but then, as now, this is no easy task. We all are involved in a political struggle with the nature of our self or images of our self. The Politics of Enlightenment holds court in our unconscious minds. The collective unconsciousness of the Way of Heaven is today somewhat out of order. The maturity that ensures a proper foundation for our Enlightenment entails that first we have to contend with the personal monster-gods of inner security. There is still fear of the other and of the unseen world. Rationalism has not yet relieved us of superstition. It merely belays it a little. Buttressed and dressed materialism may hold the purse strings of our beliefs but it is a comparatively modern conceit that can find meaning in this. The values of Modernity suffer from a rationality that is confused by the depths of human purpose and more so by its purposelessness. The Taoism of the early Chinese saw that the world was a complex and unpredictable place. They intuitively felt that materialism of the mind attached to the ten thousand things not only ignores but denies the place of Heaven in our lives. Taoist poetry, paintings and writings portray this most beautifully. They demonstrate a impression of unity and relatedness without need to highlight objects. The Taoist artist portrayed foreground and context as one.
The Tao is unknowable and all, art was then simply to allude to the Tao manifestation through the fluidity and subjectivity of the artist. A process which for the artist required great preparation and purity of mind. Modernity uses the rationale of science to predict a future for the world. The Taoist used the method of Divination and sacrifice, paying heed to omens good and bad to accept its eternal being, Tao. Good omens should produce good actions or the Way of Heaven might be offended. Bad omens aided one to limit rash action or self debasing motives, soulless action would produce disaster of a spiritual form. It was said that if a Monarch-Sage should loss his Shn, (place for spirit of the dead to enter) then his Tigers (political opponents) will soon be on his tracks. One can not deny the ring of truth in this. We are advised that the Sages of old, which usually meant the rulers of old, "did not injure souls by petty feelings about private matters; they sat quietly and waited". Soul searching is the common term for the overpowering feeling that we need to transcend our own value bases. We say upset when we mean overthrown. Our balance has gone, as well it must for change is the only constant. The message of Heaven is that Wisdom is generated by seeking to establish a closer harmony between the inner life and the outer. Heaven may co-join with Earth. A conscious, unconscious and intelligent cooperation of the Way of Heaven, Earth and Man. We are not central, humankind has but a small part in any traditional Oriental landscape. The way to enlightenment is understand the nature of our inner security. This is stifled without the mature form of existence that the Way of Heaven can offer. The Way is Virtue in action -Te, where we have compassion in belief and the virtue of action call us to open our minds and hearts to understand the futility of power alone. Lao TzŁ long ago has demonstrated the intellectual futility of power alone by directing us constantly aware of the nature of dualism. He did this through contradiction, humour and paradox. To act without acting; busy without being busy; to look equally on the great and the small, thus the Sage keeps clear of difficulty by being indifferent to thanks and reproaches for in not undertaking anything great, greatness maybe formed. It is our unconscious acceptance of a dualistic framing of mind that the Way of Heaven overcomes. Today, we may see that Heaven's Ways are feared and misunderstood as much as ever, for being of Being takes us closer to the heart of things. Some holders of power still unknowingly seek to decentralized and polarize where the good heart of the people prevails, to influence and polarize. When they are successful nation are against nations, profession are against professions, unions are against unity, and individual is against fellowship. This is to palace the Soul (of our ancestors) at War.
Power creates its own arrogance from the fantasy of a fixated relativity where short termed and partisan favoured goals can be accomplished. Success that exists through hierarchically dominated power structures can often bred a harsh heart and a soulless existence which bears the fruit of denial and resentment. The cost is a deep personal sense of disbelief particularly when there is a publically faced embarrassment. Often we accept this as a Fait accompli, presented to us by circumstances where there is no position but to accept an expedience of the self's role, while simultaneously realizing a deep sense of private absurdity. We are torn. The history of interpersonal relations are attached to such form of relativistic action, in Buddhist terms, of the wheel of life producing suffering because the Soul is at War! The everyday mind of the people is seen to dance a tune that is played by the values of those that seek to catch hold of executive power. For centuries the powers that be, have viewed that the proper place for people is to know their proper place. Freedom falls not within easy view. That there are laws and legal systems implies that injustice is well assumed and power has needs which are asserted. We reach out for an explanation for this and find beliefs. We say that this failing is a trait of human nature. Simple and true, but not to any real point. Our schooling teaches that primacy of character development, where to develop character implies we possess a clear and conscious existence, yet we do not know what we are being, or what we have done. How then can we be failing? Fantasy presides wherever character is lost and what of this hope of enlightenment? A "so what attitude" will not resolve such a tantilizing issue as readily as cleverness might presume. Enlightenment is locked out, by the self possessed of an Iron heart, for it can hear no inner sound and feel no gathering light; this is an age of power blocks, cold fronts, and terminal solutions. Competition of the fittest has become a national byword for powerlessness in the marketplace. Today's gladiatorial approach to life is no real transition for the Japanese. Existence for the Japanese mind is quality of Being portrayed through simplicity of ego. Their's is an image of endurance, fortitude and self effacement of individuality in western terms. The west is flagging & has countered with Modern Machismo. A form of egoistic gratification hard and erect is a boon to militant face of corporatism and an affront to the developing sensitivities of our young. The young have displaced machismo with androgeny & idealised feminity. Fashion contours sport, in business and belief. Perhaps this is the regretable outcome of the degeneration of true personal integrity and civil value. The majority of sporting competitors see the ends of a competitive spirit as a fashion shaped gambit producing commercial ends. Not surprisingly the majority of sports women & men must promote themselves as a defense against the competitive ethos which demands so much. Mental balance is under threat. Illness and injury is a norm at every age and level of serious competition. over built and over trained is professionalism in its worst form. Sport has provided a legitimate arena for the image makers to sell a plethora of material goals to targeted parties with some unfortunate costs. Modernity has caught hold. Sport is schooled by the media through myths of us against them, man against Man. At the end of day they have spoken in strange tongues imbuing others with misplaced ideas. One wonders what this may do to the purity of personal endeavour in spiritual terms. Todays teams are products. They must argue in terms of "necessity" and "confidence", while speaking of the power to "put a man down" in one sense or another. In success and training some call on God, some on science, some on nationalism, some are not allowed to call at all. Modernity acts as fashionable image, a God validating a competitive ethos in a perverse way. Being is not well engendered in this way.
The Way of Character - Te virtue in action, is the experience of being of Power without the need to assert it.Modernitys ethos spirits character away. Power is tamed by the use of Te virtuous action and Teh - intelligence; this is the essential spirit of fellowship & why politics is insiduously present in sport for everyday injustice and difference is symbolised and enacted on the competitive field. One may seek out satifying explanations about this drama of Modernity but the point will still remain, can character be born of competition alone in any form? Whether through prowess in sport, business, or intellectual activity the gladitiorial approach is a poor foundation for enlightenment -the reaching of the other shore. The mockingly disparaging descriptions in Taoist texts on questions of knowledge and morality, purpose and action point to the futility of grounding ones spiritual life in the naive need of the self to understand or succeed at something before Life can be felt as tangible. Judgement of ones character should rest on more than facts of performance, particularly social based ones. The Taoist preoccupation with the unknowable of which few who knew would speak, is indicative of their concern for senseless relativity born of knowledge as explanation and proof by performance. A mind lacking in self enlightened directions yields the penalty of senselessness contradiction and a strangely inherent absurdity of purpose. The Sage listens within and in not trying, feels Joy of character as an experiencing of reverence. The power of divinity in life. This is to accept presence as good sense. Personal struggle objectively viewed demonstrates the relativity of existence. Ones personal position can only be pure-relatedness.
Enlightenment is of the knower, the knowing of and what is known for it is said that, "Books speak to the mind, friends speak to the heart, Heaven speaks to the soul, everything else speaks only to the ears". Chinese Proverb. Prowess is then no escape from the trial of character. This can only be achieved through the pursuit of Wisdom and the sense of truth which can lead to appreciate the larger beauty. Wisdom arrives by listening to the heart of one's own beliefs and maturing past and through them. Intelligent maturity is not simply the ability to exercise power, either in passively or actively. To approach the values of Enlightenment we have to allow that our lives can not simply be played out under the guise of conscious life but a spiritual one as well. The western minded individual usually considers "their life" as a possession, due to them by dint of reflection and assimilation of their own beliefs. Possession of a personality does not alone warrant clarity unless one is fixated. Having thought out a conscious position, developed aa identity and discovered choice is but to play with knowledge. To claim control by reference to my-life or my-self through a set of beliefs that have been proscribed or adopted is fraught with future difficulty and we have it! Consciousness, honesty and intelligence is ensured when the path to meaning is not an easy one. Again this is an odd state of affairs, for consciousness can not be affected by what we do not know or are willing to accept. The ancients long accepted that we are simply ignorant! Zen says the ordinary mind is, one that does not need a special consciousness. The Taoists suggest that reality is not essentially equipped to endowed the mind with clear cut understanding. That's that, end of story as it were. Explanation, is for the most part, is always to overfill the cup. It is something of a dilemma for the western mind that the consciousness mind is not essential requirement for Enlightenment. How then can Satori be achieved? Samhadi felt? The mind we must say is frequently unrealistic in its attempts clear about its self existence. The notion that one possesses a body/mind and is an independent entity is resting on a simple self deception. Where is the mirror that can show us a way past this absurdity of existence? Be certain that this is no minor point.
This western poem highlights this old concern. "The lords of life, the lords of life,- I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim, Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name ;- Some to see, some guessed, They marched from east to west: Little man, least of all Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with a puzzled look :- Him by the hand dear nature took ; Dearest nature, strong and kind, Whispered, "Darling, never mind ! To-morrow they will wear a another face, The founder thou! these are thy face!" R. W. Emerson.
The Way of Heaven declares that our minds can only seek the meaning of selfhood on fertile ground. All that arrests your motion to think produces eventual falsity, the cup overflowing. The Way of Heaven need only be followed by constantly referring to the Zennist, almost phenomenalogical state of mind which falls under the notion that the most profound thought that can be held in preconception, in ones list of expectations as it were, is to expect nothing. Perhaps better is the notion in Chan Buddhism that only one thought should be held in a mind abated of activity ...to take no notice,... This will prevent the mind from confusing its ordinary nature with senseless dualistic reflections. Hear your thoughts, but do not chase them a way with meaningless difficulties. Zennist maxim. This seems easy, yet if taken to heart these attempts to change this dualistic process of our Being is often greeted by an exasperated sigh of, "I forgot". Our self preservation will not easily lose ground to the influence of enlightened ways. The western mind if affronted will offer ridicule to protect its suspected loss of egoism and pride before it will assert the will to accept, to adopt the possibility of a new position. We have a great capacity to protect, to pre-empt our own position through the power to deny and distort the most basic of practises towards the development of mindfulness. The insecurity of the western self to work through something of an innate conservative will before it may touch the Way of Heaven. It is power and control that is the issue here and it is the weakness of the self that power seeks to hide. To "feel" that power protects, is to fall prey to a world running along lines of paranoid delusion. This touches the world of affairs so deeply as to produce mass destruction of many flowers of the heart and mind. This is dispiriting, so it best that we gather our strength. The self would like to prove its own certainty by convincing us of its tangibility. It's will to power.
Taoism declares that the truly strong can let go of this form of will for they have nothing to lose. The Sage can feel the profit of loss, the playfulness of maturity, the crisis of compulsion. Maturity is demonstrated in the most trivial of statements the tone of ones help. Maturity is not self evident at any across the board level of competitive activity, "in doing the business of life". Witness any arena, any sporting or business activity, where the Greek values of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, truth and beauty are overpowered by the power ethos of an almost Roman gladiatorial spectacle. Self defense ideology proliferates here, where cliches are proffered in terms of purist ideals, such as "lets keep sport out of politics" and "business out of international relationships" are implausible. The modern heart of sport and business is caught within misplaced principles of selfhood. There is value in the struggle only if we believe that we make our changes through transition alone, however belief and struggle is no prerequiste to success. The transition to Heaven's Way is no easy path for truly there is no path. There is just sense of going, and the noticing of near arrival at such junctions of doubt and principle certainty. Humanity is clearly felt in the goals of the individual. The Sport or business that has not the means to exercise power is unlikely to demonstrate the spectacle of conflict, so where can be found the means to identify, a supporter of one's own hoped for image? The same conflict as a root experience in business can be left behind as a memory if we let go of identification of our self's need to live in this form. The self seeks through its conscious identification of heroes to gain the power of tangibility and flight. It is akin to hope in an incurable disease, where the patient feels that all disease is the outcome of a "real life". The sporting and business self that require rewards of power, and fame offers out the hand of short term gain for long term problems. Our feet have long steps to make before they reach a tranquil heart. Souls never touch the objects they reach for the moment is all too fleeting and imbued with loss. Dream may deliver us from dream, for experience is transitory form and transitory power.
Hui-Ko the first successor to Bodhidarma(470-543) expressed the meaning of the Buddha-Mind School, later called Chan Buddhism in China and later still, Zen Buddhism in Japan through the following verse, ....From the seed bed Flowers rise Yet there is no seed, Nor are there flowers. Seeing into one's own nature is the attainment of Buddhahood, of Wisdom, and brings a sense of enlightenment, but let us suppose this is the romantic and naive world of religion out of step with a REAL world. Popularist defenders of the material self argue that we have no certain safety on our streets and finding ourselves in this predicament as with all great issues of existence we seek, through our beliefs to control our problems by the exertion of power. Power that enables us to escape from this growing sense of fear is multifolded in policy making arguments. However the bottom line of it all ends up in defeat because of lack of money. What you can not pay for you have to do yourself. So, there is now the concept of neighbourhood watch in which we are players in our own small European Theatres and Tianmen Squares. We fall for the ploy of building up our neighbour confidence, to escape our feelings of fear and inadequacy. The gradings of others, the goals unconsciously felt, the tests of performance, all point to a mindfulness in which resides an ideology of power and fear, where protectionism has gone rife. We have unwittingly created this vaccum for others to find a role within. How are we ever, going to find a resting place for this self engendering perennial form of fear, of the other person, nation, race or creed of simple difference. Shall I beat it out of you before you beat it from me? There is no simple or available form of defense against evil in the world, but the self and realization of its meaning. Fear is not evoked by some God out there, like some justifying Passover, a sort of biblical plague born through a God of Victorian righteousness, we have sinned therefore we must insure with eyes and arms against suffering. We are creating it as a human event. If there be a mythical attacker its form is fashioned out of principles of sand and held together by winds of self deluding belief. The self is a fabrication that we are manufacturing. No stamp of safety can be found, for the manufacturers are wakened in their dreams only to fumble over a host of ceremonies and beliefs. It matters little in terms of essential appreciation whether the content of one's belief function, whether they are proven by the facts of the experience of Tom, Miles, or Martie. The power that protectonist policies produce and their results is not at issue here.
The world is WILL and IDEA. There is no qualification that can enable the self to deny its position, its flesh and blood. Too frequently people talk in terms of using power to resolve their conflicts, more assertive. Belted in some form and qualified with the inheritance of some understanding provides the mature teacherness of us all with the inevitablity of that first question. A question that we feel with irony on the tip of the tongue. The question of how to aspire to Power. We are requested to prempt our greatest fears, -what would you do in this or that situation? It is strange this need to legitimate and prove performance as the anxious overcoat of the western mind and world culture. Power is no recent issue, it is changing in form, that is all. Today our inconfidence is the sense of powerlessness we may get from the optional world.
Many of our minds are clad in an oddly naive magazine culture, where the public fears and is titillated by the fantasy of power. Brash challenges, clothed and created revel in cotton & man made fabrics, in playing a song of style and doctrine as though Modernity can offers a material resolution to anxiety. We are promised a solution by drawing from deep wells of "confidence building" programming of a corporate ethos. An ad man world. What qualification, belt of many colours or training method can seal us from this stupidity of purpose? Why do the leaders follow the expectations of the lowest insight? Is the struggle too great to offer? Are we so fearful of the proliferation of Enlightened characters as to only train when there is need to educate? What is this fear of the self and the world? Is it not bound by the many forms of ignorance to the Way of Heaven and the values of enlightenment? In this the world is politically immature and socially rigid. There is no self insight born of discipline and knowledge in many such popularized performances of "company philosophy". Luckily, the development of power has only a transitory comfort for even the most successful of us. Management have frequently seen that clarity of individual intent has been stifled by the common anxiety of worthiness; always asking if our pluses have outweigh our minuses. This is a disease begot of street wise belief. Akin to the simple moral reflection that some diety is watching our progress. Historically this is such an old first solution to the difficulties of existence that we are compelled to admit the idea of some image of a ruling deity, with a universal morality has powerful & solid motivation force in the minds of individual & nations alike. Corporatism has taken on this role when our previous Gods left off. Should we wish to escape this process of insecurity what can we do? Where can we place this overcoat? Oriental philosophy considers enlightenment a process that releases the mind from the status of "immaturity". This "immaturity" is developed by the level of thinking that allows someone elses authority and knowledge to establish a false self. We are in a state of "immaturity" when our crooked thinking fetters our freedom to experience. Our beliefs produce a world of illusion that is embedded in a self that debilitates the will and the spirit, thus promoting a deluded mind. Most dangerous of all is when we find knowingly or not that we have given power to another, then our engendered deception cannot lead to truth for the mind cannot develop clarity from its own tranquillity and emptiness. The mind is then the slayer of the real. We need not fear this position as quietistic, for nothing can be taken away if it has a basis in truth and further it follows that nothing can be lost if it is well founded. These notions are not in anyway attempting to deride the importance of an individuals most trusted beliefs, nor is all this to suggest that some how beliefs are intrinsically bad things, neither are they good. Some beliefs on occassions allow us to move with insight around knowledge. However, if our beliefs give us an adopted positions of multi- leveled pragmatism, then this alone can not be satisfying. The mind is seeking coherence. It is uneasy if the position of faith in the moment rests on a cloudy set of reflections where we find essentiality is lost lief and truth is full of disconnected expediences. A porridge of deadends and mysteries. Logic is not at issue here. It is consistency in thinking that is being which must test the field of difficulties. There are a variety of positions we might explore.
On Justice, Big Muscles and Virtue. __________________________________
Within any living situation we must accept the problem of having a mind that not only seeks to integrate itself with the world at large, but supports a multifarious self with a set of inclinations that are good and bad. Every action, every thought, is a reminder that life is a constant meeting of our self(s). How do we make any sense of this? The Taoist sees the method as following an open mind path, describe as Wu-Wei, No-Mindness. "Understand Tao as if you did not understand it. Enter into the Tao as if you were leaving it". Chan / Zen Buddhism call for a method of right thinking through Zanshin-the watchful unattached mind, -to see the mind as a form of Sensibilia. For example let us create a space for a perspective to develop. Let us accept for the moment that our ordinary thinking is a mass of seductive fallacies. Opinions as directed towards knowledge rather than being of knowledge. In everyday thinking the self has a assortment of concealed motives; a story to maintain, a fair and foul weather script to play, an opinion of what is and is not. Opinion is not fact,nor is it pure sense data such as light and dark. It is the commitment to declare this is my explanation, this is the limit/extent of my belief, the level of integration that the self remains comfortable in. We frequently hear the call from politicians, teachers and concerned parties for the employment of productive use of our senses, usually in the vein of "let us use our common sense". Or, the use of professional expertise "to make some sense" and of course there is the condition "of none-sense". Now in general, it is accepted that people are sometimes deceived by their senses, though we tend lieve that as a rule they can be trusted. But as the "established" professional of any walk of life will testify, our senses are "frequently dumb" - they can not "tell" us anything, true or false. What we call our senses are sculptured objects of our mindfulness and our knowledge, resting somewhat wearily on a set of transitional norms. We could for the moment liken our senses to an artifact. Education has given us a set of oddly mixed life tools, -structural enablers! Yet we know the felt process of our lives occurs in the real time of often unconscious personal present. To examine the position that we play as virtuous civil beings where we find that "power" is offered as a necessary gambit for the success of this role, I offer this example.
Everyday Immortalists at Play.
Consider how we come to be deceived by our senses (which are dumb, or limited). Firstly, we must remember that talk of deception only "makes sense" against a well informed position of non-deception, otherwise we can not recognize a position of deception by comparing it with normality. For example, let us pretend we live in a world of immortals, (and we do in a special sense) in such a world arguments would last for ever. If there was an irresolvable dispute, as Gods we would have have with eternal benevolence. This would make no sense for the person of belief and conviction. The person who holds this view feels their existence is their belief in a mortal self. They maintain a seemingly common sense view of a self that must be frequenting a world where a truth must win out, and a morality be fulfilled and personal position be satisfied. Rarely is it that we choose to live our life as an immortal might with grace and integrity following the Ways of Heaven for without beliefs how can we come to dominate through power. So regretfully, a mortally disposed humanity seeks to make sense of the world by the use of power in the form of law courts, armed forces, government and many private institutions, as well as at a interpersonal level. Thus we give power and take it for a price. These are our self estranging national societal and personal Monsters-Gods. that continue to create an insecure, aversive self and promote the idea that each individual needs to defend themselves from not only a threat from society but also from within our personal posturing. This is the warfare of personal needs. Hierarchical organizations of many forms take stock in such insecurities from insurance to education. The individual is somewhat duped into a position where any adherence to discursive thinking and experience is taboo. Immortality of experience is muted. Mastery is bypassed for the sake of bumps in the night. Lost is the power to usurp dualistic dogma --the freedom to uncover what is true or not. Ancient Oriental philosophy was primarily the search for the Truth of the here and the now, to uncover the self, to feel a Way to Wisdom. The search for Truth in western mind is somewhat different. Which ultimate truth --is an old joke in the exclusive mind of the scientific thinker? To the mind of the modern rationalist, the truth is seen as either empirically defined, the facts and nothing but the facts, or it dismissed as being a subjective set of beliefs that support a ragbag of assumed meanings, purely symbolic, which are of value only in their immediate convenience for some party or other. Implicit in this is the fear that monsters are where we find them so why entertain their imagery? However, if there is no personal truth then we turn through the wheel of condition actions to "suffer" in our search for "pleasure". The Buddhists would describe such desire and aversion as binding us wihtin the many forms of social persuasion and blackmail. Taoism would say that through this turning we then fear existence, we experience basic dread because we are going against a situation that we should accept. In this way we fail to recognise the power of our self interest. It is immense in capability to distort what is.
Today we grasp at a relative hell as Modernity seeks to tell us what to do and be. We pay the price of failing to confront ourselves. The "monsters" of non acceptance, non-recognition and non-appreciation gain points day by day. We are not beings of Being. Zen Buddhism directs our attention to the beliefs we hold about nature of the self and the world. The self comes to believe it not only "exists" but that it is an object of "possession", but this is nothing more than the mind coming to realize the position it holds, a simple state of reflective awareness. We like to suppose that awareness of this reflection means that our beliefs are confirmed, --life is,-as, -we-suppose-it-to-be. However, it is when we adopt such a position that inevitably violence is created and injustice is felt. Human life occures when there is a flow of Wisdom within the unfolding of human nature developed through genuiness, intelligence and virtue. Again, if we fail to meet our own reflection our minds will slay the real human expanse of our lives. Who could wish to be such a victim for this is perverse. We must ask how much we have lost our call to truth foresaking the inheritance human beingness.
Modernity has handed us odd forms of dualistic reflection which produces a world of objects. A world which take us nowhere, from nowhere. Such a sense of personal position is so common as to be considered the norm. We either have to admit that this is not enlightened thinking, not a means to gain knowledge, not the reality of the world, or be trapped within a world of value and burdened relativity. There is no Art to this way of living. The Way of Heaven is painfully ignored. We suffer as we take pleasure in our desires needs and wants. Is this not a special situation that requires the attention for all ages? We hold dear but a few solutions to the proliferation of Modernities Monster-Gods which have come to dominate our lives, yet our perceptions frequently bring both paddle and boat to flounder in. This generates a feeling of false security or anxiety ridden aversion. Let us accept this as a good starting point. A step to maturity. Zen asks that we leave ethics, religion, and the gambits of political science in an order so that we may analyse the "dualistic sphere of existence."
The freedom of Zen gives us deliverance from the doubts and worries of existence not by beliefs or dogmas or ritualistic practices, but by an appeal to a certain inner experience that is the recognition that the suchness of things is beyond the ability of words or reasons-deeper than intellectual formulations.
To awaken to the Ways of Heaven is to find that we have arrived in a form that has uncovered the politics of our enlightenment to gaze back at the face of Modernity and witness.
The image of the Sage exists in everyday life is testimony to this reflection. Where the self has repeatedly meet its unique original nature by contemplation and in doing so become ever more present to its political form then there is Character, Enlightenment and The Way of Heaven.
And there is more, but I shall place my madness on this tree stump for now.
I thank you for your efforts.
~ Paul Zabwodski
